Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

Then he said, ‘Stop the taxes.’ ‘Stop the taxes’ was the third slogan. What is their position on tax? Their position is to apply a great big new tax on everything you buy to fund the Paid Parental Leave scheme, which they now oppose and which, obviously, the Leader of the Opposition said back in 2002 would happen over his dead body. But then he had a metamorphosis and said, ‘I’ve got a good idea. Why don’t we increase taxes to pay for my Paid Parental Leave scheme?’ And now he says, ‘We’re going to stop the taxes’! In fact, they would increase the taxes.

These three-word slogans are really catching on, Mr Deputy Speaker. What is his climate change policy? No carbon price. What is his telecommunications policy? Demolish the NBN. What is his health policy? Local hospital boards. What is his budget policy? An $11 billion black hole. What is his education policy? Cut school funding. They are very catchy, aren’t they, these three-word slogans? That is the depth of the work that the Leader of the Opposition has done this year and in the lead-up to the election. He has no policies. All he has is slogans.

And you do not need to rely on me, Mr Deputy Speaker, to accept that analysis. Just ask the member for Moncrieff, because the member for Moncrieff has expressed today in the media the frustrations that so many members of the coalition are expressing about this totally negative, totally opportunistic Leader of the Opposition. Why wouldn’t the member for Moncrieff become frustrated? He was actually in shadow cabinet at one point, then he was demoted from shadow cabinet to the outer ministry and now to the back bench. Why? Because he has got some ideas; he has got some alternative policies. I do not agree with his alternative policies on bringing back unfair dismissal laws for small business, but at least he has had the courage to say, ‘I’ve got some policies and I think as a coalition we should debate these policies and we should substitute reasonable policy’—‘reasonable’ from the coalition’s point of view, not from our point of view. But at least he has policies in place of these three-word slogans. I do not know that this intervention by the member for Moncrieff is going to help his career, but maybe he will be joined by others with similar courage who will say they have had a gutful of the Leader of the Opposition believing, as he says, that the coalition is ‘a government in waiting’ and that he can skate through with focus tested three-word slogans.

I heard during question time the Prime Minister talking about the National Broadband Network and the ongoing demands for the coalition that there be cost-benefit analysis and so on. The Prime Minister made the perfectly valid point that it would not matter what happened; the coalition would never support the National Broadband Network. And the Leader of the Opposition said, ‘Wrong.’ Well, the Prime Minister is right because even now in his contribution to the matter of public importance he described the National Broadband Network as a disaster. Does this sound like a policy that at some point the Leader of the Opposition might embrace and that at some point, if there was a cost-benefit analysis, he would support? What did he say earlier, in May this year, about this? He said, ‘I think it’s a bad idea.’ What did he say on the Alan Jones program? He said, ‘Well, we won’t go ahead with it, Alan. We just won’t go ahead with it.’ That sounds like a pretty conclusive ‘no’ to me, and that is what the coalition’s policy is: no to the National Broadband Network, no to lifting productivity growth in this country, no to supporting the regions.

I have listened to the interjections from a new member of the National Party in this parliament, the member for Riverina, and he should be supporting the National Broadband Network. He should be supporting regional development in this country. He should be supporting the regions. But, no, again the National Party falls in behind.

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